How Did Tina Fey’s Pants Get So Bossy?

How Did Tina Fey’s Pants Get So Bossy?

How Did Tina Fey’s Pants Get So Bossy?

Today in
Slate
, Katie Roiphe
reviews
Bossypants
, Tina Fey's long-awaited memoir about conquering the comedy world and then strangling it with her monstrous man-hands (or so I've gathered from the cover art). If that title sounds familiar to you, it may be because fellow comedian Michael Showalter released a similarly named book last month,
Mr. Funny Pants
. Or perhaps you're thinking of one of the many other recent
books
,
songs
,
movies
, and
websites
whose titles playfully feature
pants
as a suffix. Where did this weird linguistic formulation come from?

The first word to get fitted with a pair of metaphorical pants was
fancy
. As early as the mid-19
th
century, people used the
collocation
fancy pants
to denote ostentatious clothing, often of European origin. In the 1842 novel
The Career of Puffer Hopkins
, for example, a group of foppish gentlemen dress the main character in "a coat of Thibet's wool, fancy pants of French jean, boots of Poughkeepsie leather, and a Panama hat." By 1870, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, writers had begun using the two-word phrase as an adjective meaning "fancy, fine, ornamental," and later, "overly fancy; posh; snobbish, pretentious." Finally, in the early 20
th
century,
f
ancy-pants
mutated into a noun, explains Graeme Diamond, principal editor of the OED's New Words Group. A 1930 edition of Ohio's
Coshocton Tribune
printed a reader's letter with the wonderfully sarcastic salutation, "Dear Fancy Pants."

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Diamond believes that it was
fancy-pants
' transformation into a noun that led to all subsequent -
pants
formations. The next prominent permutation was
smarty-pants
, which emerged in the 1930s as a spin-off of
fancy-pants
. (Author John O'Hara's bestselling 1935 novel,
BUtterfield 8
, contains the line, "Not that it makes any difference to Miss Smarty Pants, but steak is exactly what I don't want.") Like its predecessor,
smarty-pants
contains an adjective that ends in
-y
and could theoretically describe an actual pair of slacks, in the sense of
smart
meaning "stylish." Later versions deviate from the legwear theme, though most continue to begin with a word that ends with a cutesy
-y.
Diamond reports that OED files contain examples of more recent terms such as
cranky-pants
,
sneaky-pants
,
fussy-pants
,
whiny-pants
, and
clever-pants
.

The exact timeline of the formulation's development remains something of a mystery. Usage of both
smarty pants
and
fancy pants
appears to have risen dramatically during the late 1930s, peaked during the '40s and '50s, and stayed relatively high for decades before shooting up again during the aughts. (Check out this
ngram plot
for a visual.) Linguist
Mark Liberman
hypothesizes that the terms' initial rise was due to some article of popular culture, like the 1939 song "
Smarty Pants
" by Johnny Mercer and Walter Donaldson, which contains the lyrics, "You old smarty pants,/ Where'd you learn to dance?" The rise of television, cinema, and popular music during that era served to bring otherwise obscure terms into common parlance, and that's probably what happened with
fancy
- and
smarty-pants
. In 1950 alone, Jack Kerouac referred to a "Mrs. Fancy-pants" in his novel
The Town and the City
, and Paramount released a star-studded Bob Hope/Lucille Ball vehicle called
Fancy Pants
. Ever since then, America has been powerless to resist the pull of the -
pants
.

It's unclear, though, why
-pants
usage has increased so precipitously in recent years. A lot of the more creative pairings, like
cranky-pants
and
sassy-pants
, have exploded in popularity just over the last decade. A Google Books search for
bossy pants
or
bossypants
, for example, returns just six results from before the year 2000
—
but almost 200 in the last 10 years. I suspect this is a byproduct of Internet culture and the way it allows for the rapid spread of words, ideas, and other social information. Readers: What do you think?